Free Software News Archives

Flashrom, the open-source update to flash your motherboard BIOS and can also modify other flash ROM chips like graphics card BIOSes, has hit version 0.9.5. With this latest release there's greater hardware support and other new capabilities.

The Apache Software Foundation officially released the Apache 2.4 today as the first major update to this leading open-source web-server in more than a half-decade. Apache 2.4 is slated to deliver superior performance to its 2.2 predecessor and better compete with the growingly-popular NGINX web-server.

Following a "Kernel Display and Video API Consolidation" mini-summit held at the Emebedded Linux Conference (ELC 2012) last week, Linaro and other mobile/embedded Linux stakeholders have come up with several graphics-related action items for the Linux kernel. One of the proposals is to split KMS and GPU drivers in the kernel.

The recently announced KDE Spark Tablet has an ARM Mali 400 as its graphics processor, which right now is backed by a closed-source user-space driver but that's changing thanks to the Lima driver that's providing a reverse-engineered open-source ARM Mali driver. Here's a demo of the Lima driver's Limare stack running on the KDE Spark Tablet hardware.

Besides the Intel chatter, Nouveau banging on OpenCL, Coreboot's less than interesting laptop, one of the other exciting meetings this past weekend in Brussels at FOSDEM was about DMA-BUF. DMA-BUF will help a range of Linux hardware drivers from embedded devices to multi-GPU desktops.

After a very long and exhausting development process that's been going on since 2003, while simultaneously developing the Samba 3.x series, Samba 4.0 is dancing closer to an official release this year.